Spam & Eggs
A Johnny Denovo Mystery
By Andrew Kent
For KSM, whose smile lights up each day.
Copyright © 2008 Andrew Kent
Spam & Eggs
A Johnny Denovo Mystery
By Andrew Kent
Chapter 1
Carton
Johnny stared at the email incredulously.
Mad Irma systematically laid out her gripes (“. . . a poser who couldn’t solve his own lunch, much less solve cases as sophisticated as the Case of the Putrefied Pterodactyl . . .”) and her approach to eliminating him from the planet (“. . . find you, and then decapitate you with a length of piano wire and a snap of my arms across the front of your body.”). It was a pretty cool way to consider his demise, undercut by the fact that it was drawn from cliché Hollywood gangland-murder flicks. Irma was not an original thinker. Judging by the text, she was literate, with full mental capacities, hardly mad in the sense of crazed. Instead, Johnny thought, she was probably in conflict in other ways. Irma was probably a pseudonym, perhaps a stage name of a transvestite. Only a man would off-handedly suggest an approach to murder that relied so heavily on upper body strength. It’s what you fail to notice that gives you away, Johnny mused.
Threats like this usually arrived after a case had been solved, sent by someone on the periphery of the action who thought that eliminating Johnny Denovo would put them a leg up in the crime realm.
He forwarded the email to a friend of his on the police force, deleting references to Denovo cases and methods, changing all personal references to the name of a police detective involved with the case, and retaining the source email address, so his intervention was invisible. He also added the contact information for the internet service provider the emailer used, so his friend wouldn’t have to work too hard to find Mad Irma. Then he clicked “Send.”
Johnny paused to stare off into the middle distance, all the while timing the moves. Eyes poised pensively for the requisite time, brow furrowing for an instant, slight frown, then a look of reluctant acceptance – this was the routine. He sighed and swept his hands through his overly tousled mess of tarmac black hair, pulling it back tight in mock internal agony, as if emptying deep and secret catacombs of stress and anxiety. Actually, he felt fine. It’s just that after years of the world reflecting back upon him its expectations of how a cool detective should behave, he couldn’t control it anymore. The fiction had become reality. His mental pathways had changed. He’d ceased being John A. Novarro, PhD, and had become Johnny Denovo.
He felt a twinge of pity for the likes of Mad Irma. She was not his focus. She was a worker, a player, an actor. Johnny went after the puppet masters. They worried him more.
He liked his role, being the detective who confounded ambitious criminals at every turn. They couldn’t peg him. He had no discernible past, no records predating 2002, and no known relatives. If they only knew. The Johnny Denovo name was like his superhero’s cape, his cowl and hood, his disguise. The photogenic front helped distract the curious from his past, his education, his capabilities, and his motivations.
Johnny owed his secret identity to a copy-desk error during the initial coverage of his first case, which became known as the Case of the President’s Pianist. A prominent reporter had made the error with some help from spell-check, and Johnny Denovo was born – an infamous case and a strangely inventive typo. The downstream media and blogs had promulgated his new name so widely and swiftly alongside his picture – which had been taken from his best side, no less – he chose that day to embrace the name. It seemed his fate.
He looked and sounded the part, so maybe fate had known something he didn’t.
This fate was sealed when the government stepped in to cover his tracks. In one executive order, he’d been separated from a past better left behind, an empty canvas of people who paid no attention to the affairs of the larger world. This fact insulated him further from identification.
Fate was a friend.
As John A. Novarro, a lonely young scientist far from home pursuing an advanced degree in neurobiology, he had become an adherent of the evolutionary insights indicating that humans possess three brains struggling to act as one. The resulting signals could be confusing if you thought people had a single brain. By imposing the model of the three-part brain and other neurobiological insights, Johnny could crack cases and break criminals when others failed. Best of all, they often never saw him coming.
Perceptions, psychology, and behavior were all built on a common biological substrate. No matter the misdirections the physical body might send, ultimately the brain was orchestrating the show. The brain dealt the cards everyone played.
Johnny knew how to cut the deck. He could read marked cards.
Johnny’s doctoral thesis had dealt with abnormalities in the limbic system, the dog brain, the metaphor center, where the cards are manufactured and boxed. His research correlated malfunctions in these areas with psychopathic and criminal acts. His work had been published in a reputable journal, but it wasn’t linked in any way to Johnny Denovo. Instead, it was the final entry in the scholarly record from John A. Novarro, whose first steps on the academic ladder had been broken abruptly on the same evening Johnny’s fate-filled typo changed everything.
But his neuroscientific sophistication, ability to solve crimes, and telegenic looks only accounted for part of his success. His fame was amplified by statements he would often toss off to summarize the metaphorical, almost allegorical outcomes of his cases. In the Case of the Blackened Jack, he’d stated on a talk show that all he’d done was realize that the criminal had a predictable tendency based on a central survival metaphor: “When he was up, he was down; when he was down, he was up. I only had to turn his world over and watch him lose control.” Statements like this were fodder for viral marketing of all sorts – clips on video sites, parodies on late-night shows, and appropriation by political figures.
With his scientific theories and strange proclamations making him sound like a seer or a nutcase, he’d been shaped by the media, the public, and clients into something that fit the archetype of a great, handsome, and eccentric detective.
A growl of hunger gurgled through him. It was time for Wei Chou, a great Chinese cook running a busy takeout place on the bottom floor of his condo tower. Something salty and full of shrimp and peanuts sounded good. Noodles, too. He picked up the phone and hit 3 on the speed dial. A few chirps of the ringer in the basement, and Wei Chou’s brusque voice crackled across the airwaves.
“Wei Chou’s, where chow is way good. Can I help you?” the proprietor answered.
“Wei Chou, it’s me,” Johnny answered, his voice casual and disembodied. “I’m hungry.”
“Oh, I know just what you need, Johnny,” Wei Chou answered. “You want the shrimp pad tai, don’t you? And some moo-shoo pork?”
“You’ve read my mind, my friend,” Johnny responded.
“Fifteen minutes to cook, five minutes up the elevator,” Wei Chou responded. “Give me 20 minutes. I’ll put it on your bill, OK?”
“Perfect,” Johnny replied and hung up. Twenty minutes to kill.
Johnny let the cordless phone drop onto his desk with a clatter, then yawned and stretched, ending by shaking his head like a dog and making a shivering sound. He had to wake up. This interlude between cases felt like hibernation, a paralysis of the senses. He needed to get his blood flowing.
He needed a case.
Leaning toward his computer again, he noticed that after clicking “Send,” his email had begun retrieving another raft of messages.
A slew of junk email messages came across first. These were mostly gobbled up by the anti-spam filter, but one had evaded detection. He’d get to it later. He always marveled at the vagaries of humankind. Why would someone be motivated to create such a poor business as spam email? Misspellings, typos, errors, cartoon curse typography, and all in the midst of a sales approach that was impersonal, tacky, obnoxious, and unwelcome – how did these people make money? He had long thought that spam email would disappear because it failed to work, yet it churned on. A sucker born every minute? Or companies selling spam protection software, creating their antithesis so people would buy their thesis? What concept allowed it to survive as a sales form?
The two dozen emails that remained beckoned for his grudging attention. It was fan mail. “Subject: Love you, Johnny” = auto-response with subject “Thank you for the love, but let’s just be friends.” It was a nice message about how his heart couldn’t possibly be promised at this time in his career, and about how dangerous his work was. Next message, “Subject: You rock, Johnny” = auto-response with subject “It isn’t rock, but you’re rock solid for believing in me” was a message about how detectives were actually cooler than rock stars, and how he needed his fans’ belief and faith to keep forging ahead through the difficult and dangerous cases he solved. Over the past couple of years, he’d developed a number of these kinds of replies based on common slang expressions. He zipped through the rest of the fan mail in a similar manner, and then turned to the handful of legitimate communiqués.
The first ones were requests to pursue cases that fell outside of his niche – the kinds of things that would end up as run-of-the-mill court cases or divorces. He ran the auto-response with the subject “Mission statement.” This message outlined the special nature of his detective work. It read, in part, “The Denovo method is reserved for cases requiring intellectual and reasoning abilities of a special nature, along with a style and air that matches the high-priced clientele who typically involve themselves with twisted pursuits requiring deadly interventions by unique individuals like Johnny Denovo. You should feel lucky your case isn’t that kind of case – these cases are truly bizarre and frightening things, and can be extremely expensive to solve, especially with exorbitant travel, lodging, and miscellaneous expenses included. Plus, Mr. Denovo likes seeing corrupt rich people plundered of their ill-gotten gains. Think about it.”
Once he’d eliminated the tedious case requests, Johnny was left with two remaining messages. One was from his agent, Mona Landau. She wanted to see him for dinner at Maurice’s, a little French bistro with a good bar they frequented. She wanted to discuss the timing of the financial derivatives from the Case of the Unshaven Legs.
Tonight. Dinner tonight.
He could do it, but had the immediate reflex that accepting a last-minute dinner invitation was not something he should consider. It didn’t gel with his image. He should be booked weeks in advance, and even then, his dance card should be double-parked. But it wasn’t, and she probably knew it, so he accepted the invitation.
He’d disliked the Case of the Unshaven Legs – solving it had required a rather revolting demonstration on his part. Fortunately, the memory had largely receded, so he was ready to discuss how to get the silver lining out of the cloud.
The last email was the elusive spam his filters had failed to catch. He opened it and gazed at it. Why it caught his eye was unclear, yet he examined it intently. The message looked like the majority of spam emails he typically received. It was quite short. Yet something had caused his eyes to hover longer than normal over the nonsensical text, and after a moment, it began to emerge. There seemed to be a subtle rhythm to it, a kind of abstract moiré pattern developing across his neurotransmitters as he peered at the scrambled letters.
Ever since childhood, Johnny’d had a knack for spotting patterns. Whether they existed in the tapping of Morse codes or in fabrics or pictures or melodies, he could discern patterns much more quickly than most of his friends and track sustained patterns longer and in more detail. And this email had a pattern.
At first, it eluded him. The pattern was there, drumming its tympani – he could sense it more than anything else, feel it in the mix of numbers and letters, the spaces, the mangled punctuation. A pattern lurked here.
He let his eyes relax, the focus fuzz. This seemed to elicit patterns, blur the hard edges so that relationships and juxtapositions became clearer through changes in density, saturation, and proximity. The 8’s and $’s had a particular relationship, he discovered after a few cycles of focusing and unfocusing. It was a bit of double substitution, where the symbol was substituted one way the first time, and another way the second time, alternating back and forth. These were handy for hiding things from the casual observer, and also allowed relatively rapid decoding by the recipient. Not high security, but enough in most instances.
After a few minutes, the pattern became relatively easy to unravel. He brought up his word processor in a split-pane on his computer, and retyped the first sentence, pushing his hypothesized substitutions through.
The revealed message read, “The summer sun in the south of France makes all the little chickens dance.” The unscrambled code revealed a rhyme, a riddle.
It seemed pretty straightforward now. The riddle was obviously giving clues about the location and timing of something involving chickens, if you took everything literally. Johnny thought it reasonable to take the location and timing elements as stated – what else could those mean? But the chickens comment was probably a reference to some shared knowledge of the conspirators. And this looked like a conspiracy.
It was odd that it resolved into a rhyme. That suggested that the participants were fairly far along in their communications, and feeling safe within their protected realm. Not only did they feel safe, but they’d been communicating this way for so long that they were probably escalating the rhyming motif in order to remain entertained. Talk about fat and happy! Johnny’s instinctive dislike for corrupt decadence flared for a moment, a shot of adrenaline splashing into his bloodstream.
But why do this? Why hide a message in a spam email? Why not just email the person directly with it? The answer, he quickly grasped, was time-honored – by making the email look like spam, it was likely to be overlooked, in fact deleted, by nearly everyone, including intelligence and police agencies. Most automated software would easily pick up the spam cues left in the email and flush it away. He was lucky his hadn’t. Security through ubiquity – if it’s everywhere, it’s less likely to be noticed, like broadcasting white noise. Poe had made this observation involving real letters. Now, the same principle worked even when shifting to new technologies – hiding email conspiracies in plain sight had a high likelihood of success. It would be too obvious for a secret, and the intended recipient would know what cues to look for to receive and decode it quickly.
Johnny glanced at the neon-lighted clock on his wall, and just then there was a knock on his door. It had been 20 minutes, as promised, and Wei Chou was delivering his meal.
Johnny hopped up, showing uncharacteristic energy, and pounced over to the door.
“Hey, Wei,” he said, snapping the door open.
“Hey, Johnny,” Wei responded, smiling, his white shirt and apron already stained with the detritus of his work. Johnny and Wei had a very friendly relationship, having been through some harrowing experiences in the past involving difficult cases where the antagonists had tried to get to Johnny. There was nothing better than an observant and quick-witted friend on the ground floor to keep the ticks off the mutt.
“Smells great, Wei,” Johnny commented, sniffing the air exuberantly. “I’m starved, starved, starved.”
“You seem to have a lot of energy today, Johnny,” Wei noted, handing over the paper bag laden with his takeout order. “In between cases again?”
“Yep, it’s downtime. It drives me nuts,” Johnny growled.
“You need to drag your cases out more, my friend,” Wei observed. “You solve them too fast. Bad for the budget, bad for the spirit. Too much churn and burn. You should show more restraint.”
Johnny sighed. He knew Wei was right, but he also realized this was the sort of discussion his friend liked to engage in – deep and well-meaning. Wei was sincere, which was probably why he liked to cook. Cooking was a sincere person’s activity, Johnny had deduced long ago – unless they become a chef, because being a chef is a cynical cook’s activity. Eating was more of an insincere person’s thing to do, Johnny had hypothesized. It’s about taking and consuming, choosing and rejecting, instead of making, offering, and hoping. Cooking was for sincere people. Wei cooked. He was no chef, just a very good cook, and it came from his heart. Wei was really sincere, and he fretted over Johnny a little, like a mother hen.
A mother hen. That jogged Johnny’s memory.
“Hey, Wei,” Johnny said, changing the subject. “You know a lot about chickens, don’t you? You’re a cook, after all.”
“I know how to cut them up and make them taste good, get the bones out, keep the feathers out, that’s about it,” Wei said. “Why?”
“Oh, I just wondered if there were different kinds of chickens in France, that’s all,” Johnny said in a tone of mock taunting.
“I guess they’d be French,” Wei said, not taking the bait. “I don’t know even what ‘chicken’ is in French.”
“Poulet,” Johnny said, his mouth uttering the word almost before it registered in his mind. “And it’s ‘pollo’ in Spanish and Italian.”
“OK,” Wei said, barely listening. “Hey, I gotta get back. It’s getting close to real people’s lunch times, and we’ll be busy,” Wei said, turning to go.
“Great. Thanks for the grub,” Johnny shouted to the departing Wei, closing the door. The food smelled terrific. He couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into some sustenance.
Johnny popped open the containers, stuffed a few bites into his mouth, and returned to the little coded email. The sender’s address was meaningless, just a nonsense string from a domain he didn’t give a second thought, but a quick search of his deleted emails showed that about two weeks ago he’d received another message from the same address, one that his spam filter had caught for some reason. He opened the older message, and quickly noticed the same double substitution scheme at work. The decoded message in this older email read, “The eggs have flown the coop, and soon should be upon your stoop.”
More poultry imagery, another rhyme, but this one was more explicitly about an action, something moving from one place to another. Apparently, that place must be the south of France. But what things moved there, and from where did they move? Why did it matter? And whose stoop were they arriving upon?
Johnny sat back and chewed on another bite of savory rice noodles, slowly mulling over the few threads he had in front of him. His main question was, Should I spend time on this? It wasn’t as if a client was looking to retain his services, and this hardly amounted to any criminal behavior. But it sure looked like a plot was being hatched, literally, like an egg. Two or more people, communicating through widely distributed spam email using lightly encrypted rhyming riddles, were hatching a plan, following something, keeping track of something.
It felt sinister. Johnny was intrigued.
Chapter 2
Deviled
The more Johnny thought about the emails and what he’d read, the more interesting it all became. Maybe the boredom had lowered his threshold, but he found himself studiously examining the metaphors involved in order to discern the mindset at work. The eggs represented fertility, motherhood, food, fragility, and protection. These were pleasant and affirmative metaphors and images. Obviously, this was a plan to get something desirable and precious. If it had been a murder, espionage, or blackmail plot, the imagery would have been different, the metaphors morbid and dark. It was how the human brain worked.
Yet eggs could also contain surprises. They could conceal their contents, contain secrets. What secret might these eggs contain?
No matter. To get this plot going, Johnny thought, there had to be access to a decent email system, some planning, and active reconnaissance to know when items left one place and arrived at another. Something was being carefully coordinated, and the people behind it were being patient. That could only mean that the payoff was expected to be large, singular, and sudden. They were tracking something of significant value, and something they expected to be transformed into piles of cash.
Johnny added the sender’s email address to his friends list so these messages wouldn’t be eaten by his spam filter any longer. If the item the conspirators were tracking had arrived, the pace of communication might pick up, and he wanted to see what came next.
The rest of the day passed uneventfully, and in the late afternoon he went out, intending to end up at Maurice’s to meet Mona after stretching his legs. It was going to be a breezy summer evening in Boston. Lazy winds from the harbor were already cooling the city’s streets. He wore sunglasses and a Red Sox cap pulled low over his eyes to keep out the glaring summer sun and thwart curious passers-by.
The world was proceeding along normal lines, and only once or twice did he notice any illegal activity starting or ending. It was easy to spot now with his experience and observational powers – and of little interest. He knew he catered to a different clientele. His reconstructed industrial neighborhood in downtown Boston had only upscale businessmen and recent stock market beneficiaries. The truly sick and weird rich were not around much. That meant more petty thefts, low-level drug dealing, and run-of-the-mill white collar crime, nothing to match the more convoluted and ambitious exploits of his normal customers. He had to go farther afield to find the rich who cavorted in the realms he frequented.
Boston suited the Denovo mystique in almost cosmic ways – seeking to reinvent itself, it had grudgingly accepted a bargain that transformed major portions of the city into a reimagined and vibrant center. To have a world-famous, modern detective emerge from a city that was simultaneously ascendant in sports, politics, scholarship, commerce, style, and business seemed consonant and appropriate. Johnny was simply another aspect of Boston’s transmogrification.
After browsing the windows and crowds at Quincy Market, Johnny began to walk toward Maurice’s. It was time to meet Mona, auburn-haired she-devil with the brains and killer instinct of a panther, possessing the great predator’s ability to wait for the strike. She was a strong agent, and Johnny was glad she’d found him.
When his first case had been solved and his typographically fated name was appearing everywhere, he’d been beset with business opportunities. He’d settled on an agent who hadn’t suited him, and struggled to compensate for the old-school deficiencies the dinosaur brought along. Mona didn’t appear until after the initial furor had subsided and more cases had been solved, until a few years passed and other agents had come and gone, until there had been time for Johnny to have experienced some cycles of fame, steadied his attitude, and matured in his new role through calm reflection and repose. Then, with a business-like approach, she’d telephoned and stated bluntly that he was poised at the precipice of an amazingly lucrative business and personal opportunity that could last a lifetime, and that she would help him realize the full potential for a 15 percent share of the gross. She’d finished by stating that her contact information had just been transmitted by email, and that if he were interested he could call her at any of the numbers she’d given. She had then hung up with a cordial, “Any other representation would be inadequate. I look forward to working with you.”
Her dusky, rich voice had captured his imagination, her timing and cool approach had provoked his curiosity, and her efficiency and confidence had engendered trust. But his sense of Denovo style had taken hold, and he knew better than to call right back. He knew that Johnny Novarro/Denovo couldn’t be seen as needful. He would mull the decision over, perhaps even shrug off the suggestion as too planetary for his comet, make her wait a bit. So, inspired by the fact that this felt like a contract with Satan, he waited six days and sixty-six minutes before phoning back. The devil made him do it.
He recalled how she had answered the phone, her voice dripping with syrup: “Do we have a deal, Mr. Denovo.” Caller ID had gotten him, and what had seemed at the time an innocent little set of devil jokes seemed to have stimulated a force in the universe. He had gotten a chill, as if Mona had peered into his soul in that moment. Caught off-guard, he had rather uncoolly blurted out, “Yes, we have a deal.” No negotiating – not Johnny’s style to haggle, so that was alright – and a deal with the devil. He’d felt as if the road beneath his feet had suddenly lurched forward, dragging him along irresistibly.
Now he stood on a cracked sidewalk outside the trendy little bistro where Mona liked to meet. He doffed his baseball cap, jamming it into his back pocket and rearranging his hair with a scratching and fussing motion as he walked in. Mona was already seated, her silky dark red hair cascading over her ivory shoulders and the spaghetti-strap black dress she wore. She was beautiful, but dangerous. As he removed his sunglasses, Johnny turned up the volume on his act to counter the competing and seductive music she played.
“Evening, Mona,” Johnny said, a smart-ass smile on his face and a twinkle in his eye. Mona glared at him for a moment, just like a big sister sizing up her brother and admitting that he was a pain but that she loved him. Assessing her response, Johnny knew he had won yet again. It was an empty victory. He felt like he won battles while she was somehow winning the war.
“Hello, Johnny. Nice to see you still haven’t grown up,” Mona replied in a world-weary tone. “Have a seat, won’t you? I’ve ordered a glass of wine, but only just glanced at the menu.”
Johnny flipped one long leg over the back of his chair and settled smoothly into the seat, fluid and sophisticated. The waiter, happening by with a plate in either hand, caught Johnny’s eye and stopped.
“Hello, Mr. Denovo,” the waiter beamed. “The usual drink to start?”
“Yes, please, Ivan,” Johnny replied. “Gin, tonic, and lemon.”
“Right away, sir,” Ivan said, and then walked briskly over to a neighboring table to deposit the dinners with their owners.
Johnny glanced up at Mona, as if breaking free of a reverie, and smiled. “So, how are you, my dear agent?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” Mona responded curtly as Ivan delivered her wine. “But we’re here to talk about how to divvy up the fees from the case before last, the hairy legs case. The payments were sizable, and the client even threw in a bonus of stock options. Very lucrative case, but not a straightforward cut for yours truly.”
All business, as usual, Johnny thought, watching her speak. Beautiful nose, lips, and eyes, and that smooth ivory skin offset by hair dark red enough to look raven indoors. Really a gorgeous creature, but completely unapproachable emotionally. He just liked looking, and could easily multitask the auditory and visual downloads.
“Well, I might have another case cooking, too,” Johnny noted casually, as if he were noting that Mona’s wine was a chardonnay. “So, since I’m busy, I’ll propose that you take the stock options and give the rest to my foundation. You don’t mind a little risk in your portfolio, do you?” he taunted.
Ivan returned with the gin and tonic with lemon, and hurried away. Mona gave Johnny a condescending smile, as if to convey that his solution’s simplicity might reflect his mind’s equivalent state. Johnny held his face still, impassive, and sipped from his drink. It was well mixed and tart.
“Johnny, that doesn’t help my cash flow,” Mona stated flatly. “It’s not about risk, but about what I can spend now. I don’t want stock options to add to my nest egg.”
Johnny startled a little inside, but this only manifested itself externally as a twitch of his eyebrows that could have been caused by almost anything. More egg imagery. This was one of the most amusing things about his pattern-detecting abilities. Sometimes, it seemed as if once a pattern manifested itself in front of him, the entire world reverberated with it. Eggs and France – and now nest eggs in a French bistro. He was living the emails from this morning, the most interesting pattern he had to ponder right now, even if its significance was unclear. He was feeling a pattern begin to mature into a theme. This usually meant that something of some magnitude was going on, not just random noise. He believed in fate, Johnny Novarro/Denovo, whose identity had been cast by fate. Fate was just the history of patterns. His pattern was one of reinvention, which had culminated in a change of actual identity.
Mona closed the menu, having glanced at it again during the silence that ensued after her “nest egg” comment. Ivan approached, pad in hand.
“I’ll have the chicken special,” Mona said – inevitable, given the theme that was emerging, Johnny thought. “And not too many mushrooms, please. Johnny, would you like anything?”
Ivan looked over expectantly. Johnny was unprepared. It didn’t show. He casually asked Ivan to surprise him, and left it at that. He’d eat about anything. The lunch from Wei Chou had been good enough to satisfy his taste buds, so this was just a fuel stop, not a culinary experience.
“So, do you want to go over the numbers?” Mona said, reaching into her briefcase. And the rest of the unremarkable dinner was consumed by the rustle of papers, the clicking of calculator keys, the scratching of numbers on paper, and Johnny’s occasional protestations that this all really didn’t matter to him. By the time the dessert menus arrived, the math was done, and Johnny’s foundation came out with a sizable six-figure donation, even after Mona’s cut.
“That will do nicely,” Johnny noted. “When will the armored truck arrive?”
“The bank is holding the money and stocks, so I’ll have them issue the checks tomorrow. Does that sound OK?” Mona said, beaming him a heart-stopping smile, looking like something between a seductress and a satisfied carnivore. It was unsettling.
Johnny shrugged and smiled with resignation, trying to impart the feeling that he was only doing this because he must.
“Fine then,” Mona said. “Now, you said you have another case . . .”
Johnny perked up a little, and his eyebrows twitched again. “Oh, yes, that,” he said with feigned disinterest. “It’s really rather preliminary.”
Mona let out a scoffing and lovely little snort. “Don’t play games with me, Mr. Superstar Detective. I know your style. What is it?”
“Just a tremor in the Force, a shadow in the sky, a whisper in the dark,” Johnny said in a mock radio voice, deeper and more liquid than usual. “Just two emails that I found today that intrigue me.”
“Who emailed you?” Mona asked, genuinely interested. She seemed sincere, but Johnny knew she never cooked. He wondered if his theory linking sincerity and cooking was flawed. But then he remembered that she was a better actress than he was an actor, and probably had her sincerity catered.
“Nobody emailed me. They were spam emails, but with strange characteristics,” Johnny continued. He started playing with his dessert fork, which Ivan had just placed in front of him, a prelude to the appearance of his apple tart. “Strange emails, and the more I think about them, the more I want to know.”
“Sounds interesting,” Mona prodded, stirring the coffee that had arrived with the dessert forks.
“The one I first noticed wasn’t intercepted by my spam filter for some reason,” Johnny stated. “I opened it because I was bored, and noticed a pattern in what at first appeared to be random characters. It was a riddle hidden by double substitution, and it even rhymed once I decoded it. Then I searched my deleted emails for anything else from this sender, and found another message about two weeks old, coded in the same manner but with a different rhyming couplet. Very intriguing.”
Mona seemed transfixed. Johnny liked this part of their relationship, when the cold businesswoman was replaced by an admiring and beautiful fan who knew him well. It almost felt like a romance, but luckily was not. Still, her ability to generate warmth in this manner made him feel especially open to discussions with Mona, and made her a useful sounding board at times like these. Since her success was tied to his, she was like a partner at his virtual firm.
“So, it sounds like the ‘Purloined Letter’ and secret codes and things like that, right?” Mona asked.
“That’s what I get out of it. Hide in plain sight through spam email, but encode just in case, and then use riddles to conceal and keep things fun. I think they’ve been at this for a while.” Johnny paused, and sat up straight. “You know, that’s interesting. At first, I was torn, thinking either the rhyming was for fun, or to conceal. But now I’m thinking the layered approach, using rhyming couplets as riddles, has to have a purpose.”
Mona tilted her head. “I’m not quite following you,” she said.
Johnny paused, and pursed his lips against his tented fingers. “I think there’s a concern about their messages being intercepted by people who would know to look for them. As if there is a rivalry here or someone on their trail.”
“Well, you have to admit, if you found the code that easily, you can bet the government has, too. But their computers probably dismissed the rhymes as silly nonsense,” Mona speculated
Johnny thought about this. The light coding would be fine for speed, and the rhyming couplets could easily defeat automated surveillance. It was probably a balance between some competing concerns.
“I guess you’re right,” Johnny conceded. “Just speculating.”
“These seem to have gotten your attention,” Mona noted. The desserts arrived. They’d eaten sparsely during dinner, business discussions dominating the time, so this last course was greeted eagerly. The next comments were muffled somewhat by food in their cheeks.
“Well, the riddles are weird,” Johnny said, a fresh bite of apple tart in his mouth. “They talk about eggs, and chickens, and France, and then I’ve had a day with a few things poultry and French. It’s like a thread in the cosmic sweater is unraveling a bit, and I want to tug on it some more.”
“I see,” Mona reflected, swallowing a bite of profiterole. “Your theory about fate is obviously coming into play.”
“Yes, you’ve got it,” Johnny agreed. “Call it what you will, but it has helped me to anticipate things before, you know.”
“I know, I know,” she said, tossing her glistening hair back as she lifted her coffee cup from the table. Her pale shoulders gleamed at him. “I’m not arguing with you, just noticing a habit of yours. Next, you’ll be on about the three-part brain.”
“That will come when I get to know some of the protagonists,” Johnny commented, swallowing. “I’m not sure what it all means yet, but it seems to indicate a fair amount of planning, patience, and coordination. That’s interesting. And the covert communications make it clear it’s not legal. That’s even more interesting. If it’s been planned for a long time, it may feed long-term trends, larger geo-political patterns. Locating events in France puts things smack dab in the heart of Mediterranean intrigue. This could be big.”
Mona paused pensively, then looked across the table and asked in a smoky voice, “So, you have two mysteries to solve, from my perspective.”
Johnny braced himself. For months, he’d sensed the sexual tension between them, and dreaded the moment it became overt and active. This nice dinner in the intimate surroundings of a favorite eatery had heightened the underlying tension. If it became too great, Johnny feared, it might explode. She wasn’t going to pull the pin on this grenade, was she?
His face remained impassive, even though his heart rate had increased. “What two mysteries?” he asked.
“First, the one you’ve identified, namely who is planning what and why,” Mona stated, then sipped some coffee. The pregnant pause worried Johnny even more.
“Second,” she started, “how you are going to find who you’re working for. I need to get paid.”
Johnny felt a surge of relief flood over him.
“I see what you mean,” he responded in monotone. “I need to find out who would care enough to pay me to protect their goods or save the world if something has already happened. What do you suggest, great huntress?”
“I suggest you wait,” Mona said unsmilingly. “If this is big, then the event will occur, you will know about it because it will happen in your client base of power-mad weirdos, but you will hold extra information that will give you an advantage and help you look superior. So, keep watching, keep noting your patterns or predicting fate, and you’ll be ready when the time comes.”
Damn, Johnny thought, that was pretty good advice.
“Just what I was thinking,” Johnny said coolly. They both knew he was lying, and that asking Johnny Denovo to wait was like asking a cake to unbake. They chatted some more, Johnny paid the check, and they went their separate ways, yet again, Mona’s tall and lovely form moving elegantly away from him until she turned a corner and vanished. Johnny jammed his baseball cap back on his head as he turned away to start the walk home. He hated waiting.
Chapter 3
Incubation
No new cases crossed Johnny’s threshold over the next few days, and activities on other fronts were nondescript. He worked out and found himself doing his tai-chi more slowly, almost as if he had a case. Maybe the fact that he was in the middle of stalking these emails let him believe a case was around him, enveloping him. He was calmer since his mind had something to play with, a toy, an amusement, a worry stone at the least.
And he was worried. Being aware of a plot forming made him hypersensitive to environmental changes. Things were far from normal. News from some of the globe’s more unstable areas seemed to be disappearing, he had realized, and silence was encroaching more each day. This was what worried him. It was as if people in volatile places were holding their collective breath, waiting for something big to happen.
And then another email arrived from his mystery sender. He knew it would. It was part of a stack of patterns intricate enough to force fate.
This message was another rhyming couplet double-substituted in the same way as the others. It took Johnny only a few minutes to decode it this time. The message again sounded like another step had been taken by the protagonists behind it: “Night and day, there to see, soon enough they will be free.” Nothing about chickens, eggs, or France this time, but Johnny figured that bit of stage-setting had occurred in the other communications. The message confirmed that whatever was being tracked consisted of more than one thing. The rhyme was about parts of a day and what sounded like a heist of valuable objects. The action was heating up. It was time to do a little more work on the technical front.
Johnny took the elevator to the parking garage in the basement of his condo tower, jumped into his stylish European convertible, and sped through the pleasant afternoon air toward Boston’s busy wharf, the warm sun glistening on the rippling water, the currents like stains on the surface. He was headed to see Tucker the Technogeek, Tucker the Tigerlily, Tucker the Tenfinger Terror. Tucker the Nicknamed would have some answers.
Tucker Thiesen worked out of his large apartment in a renovated skyscraper near the wharf. It was a rather nondescript locale for a person of such skill and so many monikers. Yet, if Johnny was about projecting an image of style, Tucker was the opposite, and seemed to cultivate an image of not caring about image. In fact, sometimes he was downright annoying, with Johnny’s stylish sheen polished highly and Tucker’s rough pumice threatening to mar its surface if Johnny got too close. But Tucker could do things nobody else could, and knew that his power lay in his skill, not his style. He did freelance operational activities for some of the world’s most secretive clients. He and Johnny had been friends since childhood. Johnny always looked forward to hanging out with Tucker.
Tucker’s apartment was different, Johnny thought as he parked his car. It seemed endless in its inner recesses, and rooms seemed to rotate back and forth at will. Perhaps that was because each time he visited a different door was open, so Johnny was always entering without interference into the room indicated, whichever one Tucker happened to be in.
Tucker had repeatedly reassured Johnny that as a master of surveillance and things covert and dangerous, he was perfectly safe in his seemingly open environment. Years ago, Johnny had donated a hair and a few other personal items to Tucker’s systems, and afterwards he was told he was welcome anytime. He never understood exactly how this form of carte blanche had been accomplished or how it was maintained.
When Johnny found him, Tucker the Tumultuous was in a deep soul-kiss with a device hooked up to his guitar that transformed his voice in synchronization with the guitar strings. The music he was producing was good, but deafening. In fact, Johnny had heard it coming up the elevator, despite the room being buried inside the building and dampened acoustically, the walls pleated with baffles and grilles.
Tucker stopped when he noticed Johnny and spit the mouthpiece out. “How’d I sound?” he yelled as the last bit of reverb hovered in the air.
Johnny knew he had to yell back. Tucker would be wearing earplugs. “Like Frampton, but with bigger words.”
Tucker laughed and swung the guitar deftly down into its stand. “I love it. It frees my mind. It’s a great way to start the afternoon. I get so foggy after lunch.” He pulled his earplugs out as he spoke.
Johnny smiled at his old friend as they shook hands. “And you do love your lunches,” Johnny teased. Tucker the Trucker was portly, as his mother might say, and had always had a robust appetite, even as a kid.
“I do, I do,” Tucker affirmed. “Today was fresh steamers at that ramshackle crab house down the road. Delicious with butter! But what can I do you for?”
“Ah, yes. Well, I have a little curiosity for you,” Johnny stated, looking around at the paraphernalia littering the room. If it was electronic, it was here. “It’s an email thread I’d like you to look at. Have time?”
“I’ll make the time for you. Hey, close the door and follow me,” Tucker said, wending his way through a door behind the amps he’d been using and into an adjoining room, large and brightly lit, its back wall consumed by computer monitors arranged around a workpit in which a single beat-up office chair resided. Moving into the room, it became apparent that this was really two rooms with a wall missing between them. The brightly lit portion housed Tucker’s main computer center, the nexus for his real job, while a more warmly and dimly lit area was filled with comfortable chairs and beautifully decorated walls, one of which supported a large plasma television. The other wall was consumed with a large piece of abstract art, a set of large maroon boxes around a central empty box, all on an background that looked like sand. The inside of each box had intersecting arcs and three lines crossing at various angles. It was a striking piece.
Johnny pried his attention away from the arresting artwork. The unflattering fluorescent lights overhead gave everything in the computer pen a sanitary rinse that left bright surfaces still looking unclean, as if a film of heavy use lay over them. It was a place both alive and depressingly neglected, like a mossy pond in the woods.